25 Years and Adele

Last night Bill and I went to the Adele concert at the Xcel Center in St. Paul.  It was also the 25th anniversary of the day he and I met.  I hadn't remembered that. Bill did. That is one of the things I love about him.  He bought me 25 red roses to celebrate, and we went to dinner at the St. Paul Grill, and after the concert stayed the night at the Old University Athletic Club Hotel--walking distance from dinner and the show.  You could say we did it up right.  Thanks, love.

Yes, 25 years ago we walked to our first 8:00 a.m. freshman calculus class at NIU.   I studied my butt off and he never cracked open the book. Years later I learned that he had already had calculus in high school.  He never mentioned it at the time.  Later at 2:00 p.m. we had music theory with Professor Steve Squires.  Bill was dating Jody back in high school in Minnesota and I was dating Dean in the Air Force in San Antonio.  Jody was Catholic.  Dean had a motorcycle.  Mismatched long distance relationships. . . Bill and I ate every meal together in the dorm, with Tracey the bassoon player, and Tim the french horn player, for a year and a half until I transferred to UT Austin.  It was a little wacky. The four of us were inseparable.

Fast forward 25 years and we are living in the suburbs with these two weird and wonderful children.  Where did they come from?  How did this happen?  Are you the same Bill?

The other day he was proof reading a blog entry for me and I asked him if the whole blog was just stupid and irrelevant. He said something sweet to me.  When we started getting back in touch after years of sending Christmas Cards and me coming to an occasional Glenn Miller Orchestra concert when they would be in Austin--we started emailing each other.  This was in the day of dial-up and Eudora.  I was checking my email about 30 times a day--just to see if he had written.  So-the other day he told me that reading all those emails from me, was part of what made him fall in love with me.  So, I must not be too bad of a writer.  All those emails are printed out in a Kinkos box somewhere in the basement.  I should drag them out and read a few.

What I wanted to write about tonight was the Adele concert.  I got a little sidetracked.  It is a little weird that when Bill and I met she wasn't born yet.  That made me feel old...

Adele was wonderful.  It renewed my faith in the future of pop music.  She sang to an arena of 10,000.  It was her, her five piece band, and two back-ground singers.  And some lamps on stage and a few rugs.  That's it.  No pyrotechnics.  No screaming guitars.   No light show.  Half of it was just her and the pianist Miles Robertson.  (Who incidentally, did not make any wrong notes all night, to say the least.)  Just a singer in a pretty dress with a pretty hair-do.  No wind machine.  No jumbo-tron. She just sang.  And the audience loved it.  She even sang some songs sitting on a bar stool-Sinatra style.  The girl has pipes, and it was so great to just hear her sing.   At one point she asked for the lights to be turned on the audience and she invited us to sing.  Maybe she didn't know that Minnesotans sing in four part chorale harmony.  It was really pretty with all the cell phone lights sparkling too.

What makes pop music "good"?  The same thing that makes classical music "good".  When it has the ability to touch our hearts and make us feel emotions.  When it cuts to the chase of what it feels like to be loved, or to not be loved, by the one we love the most.

Lucky for me, I feel loved by the one I love most.  Happy 25th, Bill.
La Doo.